In the play Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, we see a stage direction that has caused mouths to drop open since the 17th century: “Exit, pursued by bear.” Those who wrote about it mostly assumed he meant an actor in a bear costume. But Tom Levenson found an intriguing footnote in the book Verdi’s Shakespeare, by Garry Wills that throws a different light on the subject.

It used to be thought that the “bear’ was a man in costume.  But scholars have now focused on the fact that two polar bear cubs were brought back from the waters off Greenland in 1609, that they were turned over to Philip Henslowe’s bear collection (hard by the Globe theater), and that polar bears show up in three productions of the 1610-1611 theatrical season….Polar bears become fierce at pubescence and were relegated to bear baiting, but the cubs were apparently still trainable in their  young state.”

Read more in the post In Praise of Footnotes. You might even start reading the fine print in your books! Link -via Improbable Research

(Image credit: Flickr user Rainer Hungershausen)

Many of the pools in this list are spectacular because of their location or view, but the pool at the Golden Nugget Hotel in Las Vegas has a shark aquarium in the middle of it! The salt-water aquarium is separated from the swimming area, but only by glass -and they even have a water slide running through the shark enclosure! http://www.travelsupermarket.com/blog/9-awesome-hotel-pools/ -via the Presurfer

The song by Journey came out thirty years ago, but after its initial hit status, "Don't Stop Believin'" got more mileage thanks to the TV shows The Sopranos and Glee. After all this time, I just learned a fact that everyone in Detroit knew all along.

For nearly 31 years, this flash of distracting cognitive dissonance has struck each time Steve Perry's bright tenor lands on the iconic but geographically flawed second line: “just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit." Because, as anyone with a tie to the Motor City knows, South Detroit doesn’t exist, either as a term of art or a geographical locale.

East Side? Sure. It’s where Eminen spent his adolescence. West?* Home to the original Motown Records. Southwest? Best Mexican food in the state. But South Detroit is as fictional as the Shire of Middle-earth.

Even songwriter Perry did not realize that there was no such place until just a couple of years ago. He finally explains how it ended up in the song. Link -via Metafilter

A newly-discovered frog, Paedophryne amauensis, is not only the smallest frog species, but the smallest vertebrate ever found. The frogs were found in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, living among fallen leaves. They are 7 millimeters long, about a quarter of an inch.

They are well camouflaged among leaves on the forest floor, and have evolved calls resembling those of insects, making them hard to spot.

"The New Guinea forests are incredibly loud at night; and we were trying to record frog calls in the forest, and we were curious as to what these other sounds were," said research leader Chris Austin from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, US.

"So we triangulated to where these calls were coming from, and looked through the leaf litter.

"It was night, these things are incredibly small; so what we did after several frustrating attempts was to grab a whole handful of leaf litter and throw it inside a clear plastic bag.

"When we did so, we saw these incredibly tiny frogs hopping around," he told BBC News.

The frog pictured is sitting on a dime. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16491477 -via Fark

(Image credit: Rittmeyer et al)

(YouTube link)

Joseph Herscher turns the page of his newspaper with flair. If you are a bit confused by some of the steps, they are all explained in an interactive graphic at the New York Times. Link -via Cynical-C

Bryan Lenning made a poster of pictograms for the titles of each James Bond film. It was selected as one of the winners of a James Bond art contest at Superpunch. Go see the rest of the winners! Link -via Laughing Squid

In an issue of Ladies Home Journal published in 1900, an author made predictions of what the world would be like in the year 2000. Surprisingly, many of them were spot-on.

Open fires and chimneys will be replaced by home heating and air conditioning systems, with hot or cold air at the turn of a “spigot” (faucet or tap.)

Stores will buy food ingredients in bulk and prepare ready-cooked meals at cheap prices which people can reheat at home. Customers will also be able to get meals delivered by automobile. (That said, Watkins also suggested food could be delivered to homes via pneumatic tubes, and that customers would send back the crockery and cutlery when they finished eating.)

Color photos will be sent around the world, with images shot in China appearing in US newspapers within an hour.

Read more at Geeks Are Sexy, where the predictions are sorted by whether they came true or were way off the mark. Link

Everyone loves to see the ice cream truck coming down the street! And in their heyday they were designed to be pleasant -even if they are only pleasant memories. Dark Roasted Blend has a collection of spiffy ice cream trucks (and ice cream bicycles) for your perusal. Link

(Image credit: Mr. Whippy)

While some scientists are working on an invisibility cloak to hide things, Cornell postdoctoral researcher Moti Fridman and his colleagues have been working on a "temporal cloak," to hide events in time.

A physical object or even another beam of light in the laser beam’s path could create a change in the laser light that the detector would register. But with some clever optics, Fridman and his colleagues were able to open up a brief time gap in the beam and then close it back up as if the beam had gone undisturbed, and such that the detector did not register the interruption. The gap allows anything that would have otherwise affected the beam to instead slip right through [see animation below], leaving no trace for the detector to pick up.

The events that can slip through the cloak have to be very fast: the gap is only 50 trillionths of a second. The video at the link explains the process much more clearly. Link -via Monkeyfilter

It appears that redditor infeKteDx never paid attention to any grocery shopping his family did. Now he is on his own and is totally overwhelmed by the simple task of purchasing bread. The resulting thread is priceless, with suggestions like calling his mom to find out what bread to buy, plus recommendations for different breads to try. Link

No matter how much you teach a child, there is something that will surprise him when he is on his own. For example, you can teach a teenager to drive safely, but if he never paid attention to how roads are laid out, he'll never find his way home. The first day I was in my college laundry room, I met two girls who had no idea how to wash their clothes because they had never done it. Is there something that you never happened to learn from your family that surprised you when you left home?

Now that you know what is expected of you, you'll be able to prepare that little talk for your friend's upcoming wedding. Another gem from The Doghouse Diaries. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

An unnamed man in the town of Montmélian, France, dropped his wallet into a sewer opening in a parking garage and went to retrieve it. He then became stuck, with his head in the pipe and his legs sticking out of the manhole. The man spent the entire night like that until a passer-by called emergency services in the morning. After he was rescued, police figured out what he was doing when it happened.

Unfortunately for the man, there were yet more problems in store. Police also spotted that he had been siphoning off waste oil from his car into the sewer at the time.

Disposing of waste oil in this way is an offence in France, with serious cases risking up to two years in prison and a fine of €76,000 ($97,000).

The moral of the story: if you do something illegal, don't get caught with your head in a sewer. http://www.thelocal.fr/2233/20120109/ -via Arbroath

It's once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what these things are? Or maybe you can amuse us with an entertaining wild guess!

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many guesses as you'd like in separate comments. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: Berhard was the first in and had the right answer, too! These are caulking chisels used on a ship, specifically "the Great Lakes schooner Mary A. Gregory, c. 1900." They are now in a museum display. The funniest answer came from Straight Flush, the first of several who mentioned Wolverine, who said "They are cancerous tissue growth removed from Wolverine’s thoracic cavity, not to mention adamantium tissues .. duh!" Both win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! See the answers to all the mystery items this week at the What Is It? blog.

I Love Ninjas Beanie | $29.95

Let the world knew you love ninjas with this rockin' Ninja Beanie from the NeatoShop! It keeps your head warm and serves as an excellent icebreaker at the same time. These 100% handmade hats are made from 100% wool on the outside with 100% polyester lining, then there's the yarn and felt decorations that tell everyone how you love ninjas! Get yours while they last, and while you're at the NeatoShop, check out more headgear you'll also love.

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Oscar the Grouch Backpack | $16.95

Look, it's Oscar -with sunglasses! How cool is this? It's a Sesame Street Junior Backpack featuring Oscar the Grouch at the NeatoShop. The toddler size backpack has padded adjustable shoulder straps, a zipped compartment, and a velcro compartment. See the other Sesame Street Junior Backpacks at the NeatoShop -your child's favorite character is bound the be there! And there are plenty of other Sesame Street products as well.

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